How to remember? Can we learn any techniques from memorization competitions? Ever since I saw Alan Alda’s “American Scientific Frontiers” PBS show about him participating in a memory competition, I have been amazed by people who can remember things.

“Fluent Forever” describes one mnemonic technique Person – Action – Object (PAO). The three basic ingredients to a story are person, object, and action. By using PAO, you can connect an image it any kind of word. More importantly, you can attach groups of similar words to a story.

For example, if you wanted to remember the verb pattern fight/fought, buy/bought, and think/thought, you could choose a person (Patrick Stewart) and imagine him fighting something, buying something, thinking something. This takes something vague (a form of irregular verb conjugation) and makes it into a story you can picture. [Fluent Forever, pages 127 – 129]

I wonder if I could use this technique to remember groups of verbs like the “oh” verbs.

I had already stumbled upon this myself by using Clark Kent and Superman to sort out the changed and unchanged form of the verb stems. Somehow remembering people is easier than remembering verb conjugations. My love of Grammaropolis is that terms like adverb and noun become cartoon characters. Characters then become part of stories.

Which of these seems easier to remember the “oh” verbs?

Christopher Robin wanted to play 놀다. He came 오다 to Pooh’s house. “Come in” 들어오다 said Pooh. “Come out” 도오다 said Christopher. “I’ve brought 가져오다 honey. We can have a picnic on the high hill 놓다.” Christopher Robin watched 보다 Pooh eating honey and saw it was good 좋다.